Mary DeMarle gave a speech at GDC Online about the writing of Deus Ex, saying that everyone on the team, at some point in the game, was brought into the story process. So even if they're making props, they could understand the overarching goal of what the team was making, and get context and thus understand, and appreciate, what they were doing.

I think with big teams, people can lose sight of what they're actually making. You get bogged down on one piece. From that, big games can feel really piecemeal. You can see the divisions between things.

SD: Yeah, totally. I'm playing a couple of games, and I said, "Oh, this is a different game level designer that did this, because there's a big seam, somewhere." And with smaller games, you need to have more multitasking people. They need to touch more, because you don't have super-specialists that just do certain tasks.

They like to not do just one single thing during three years. I think we're trying to put into place the better conditions for craftsmanship, because the games that I personally enjoy, I see the quality of how they assemble all this together, and -- for me, anyway -- that's something, really, that distinguishes yourself between a regular product, and a great product. And smaller teams are better positioned to do that.